I just want to play with my son on the same map

Hi! I'm an old man and I don't know how the multiplayer thing works with BeamNG.drive. I want to play with my son and drive around on the same map with him in one car and me in another. He could be on his computer here in the house and I could be on mine, and we could see each other in the game. Is that possible?

I'm sorry, I'm just used to traditional games where you just plug in another controller and you can get 2-player going right away.

I bought the game on Steam under my own account, and have created a steam account for him and enabled family sharing between his account and my account. But that doesn't seem like it does anything aside from let him use the game when he's logged into his account (for some reason I had to login to my account on his computer to activate it but that's beside the point and unrelated, I think?)

I tried the Remote Play Together thing, but that just allows us to play as only a single player, and swap who controls the screen (https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/0689-74B8-92AC-10F2). It's not a true multiplayer thing.

I saw there was a thing called BeamMP which adds multiplayer to the game. Is that what we should use?

Or do I have to buy two copies of the game in order to play with him? Does he have to own a copy on his steam account?

Please help an old man out. I just want to play a game with my son.,

 

Currently, there is not native support for multiplayer in the base game. However, there are a few mods that allow you to do so, most notably BeamMP, as you mentioned. In order to set that up, you can follow the instructions on its main page.
If you do not mind playing with potential strangers, the setup ends there; you and your son can join the same server to play together. If you intend to play by yourselves, you can host your own server using your own computer, although it is a bit more technical to set up.

Good luck! If you have any other questions, feel free to ask.

 

You can always use the Multiseat feature as well. To enable it, do as Nadeox1 said here:
„Options > Gameplay > Use Multiseat for this session.
Then just spawn another vehicle, so that you have two.
Now, each 'device' will controls a car.
ie. one uses a keyboard, the other uses a controller/wheel or even smartphone with our 'remote control app' (the app is old and outdated now).

In the scenarios that supports multiseat (like the derby ones), just assign your controller to the car you want from the dedicated screen you see before starting that scenario.”
(Unless this is an outdated method, but I’m 100% sure they didn’t remove multiseat)